In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Chronicle_of_Ioannis_Skylitzis_Bulagar_Defeat.jpg

manqueller
n. a man killer; an executioner

In 1014, after a decisive victory over the Bulgarian Empire at the Battle of Kleidion, Byzantine emperor Basil II followed up with a singularly cruel stroke. He ordered that his 14,000 prisoners be divided into groups of 100; that 99 of each group be blinded; and that the hundredth retain one eye so that he could lead the others home. The columns were then released into the mountains, each man holding on to the belt of the man in front. It’s not known how many were lost on the journey, but when the survivors reached the Bulgar capital, their tsar collapsed at the sight and died of a stroke two days later. Basil is remembered as “the Bulgar slayer.”

| Death · History · Language

Fogbound

From 1995 to 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a bad writing contest to mark “the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles.” The final year’s winners:

First prize:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

— Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” in the journal Diacritics

Second prize:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalise’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

— Homi K. Bhabha in his book The Location of Culture

Third prize:

As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of ‘les noms du père’, a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (‘Les Non-dupes errent’), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.

— Steven Z. Levine in Bradford Collins, ed., Twelve Views of Manet’s Bar

The contest’s only condition was that entries not be ironic: “Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.” The full list of winners is here.

| Language

Hazard

From an April Fools’ feature in LIFE, April 4, 1938:

https://books.google.com/books?id=40oEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6

The photo appeared in a German paper, which claimed the story was American. “To Germans, actual American goings-on are fantastic enough to be April Fools’ tricks.”

| Hoaxes

Andy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Andy_the_goose_and_Gene_Fleming.jpg

When a goose without feet was hatched in Harvard, Nebraska, in 1987, local inventor Gene Fleming adopted the bird, fitted him with baby-sized shoes, and taught him to walk. In time “Andy” learned to swim and fly as well; he gave inspiration to disabled children and received a lifetime supply of shoes from Nike, but it wasn’t to last — in 1991 he was killed by an unnamed perpetrator.

| Oddities

Strain’d

If mercy modifies the demands of justice, then to be merciful is perhaps to be unjust. But manifesting injustice is a vice, not a virtue. This seems to mean that mercy is a vice. A sentencing judge has been hired to enforce the rule of law that society has agreed upon. If he tempers this, even through love or compassion, then arguably he’s departing from his sworn obligation. Angelo says in Measure for Measure:

I show [pity] most of all when I show justice,
For then I pity those I do not know,
Which a dismissed offense would after gall,
And do him right that, answering one foul wrong,
Lives not to act another.

(If we try to claim that mercy is a form of justice, so that every act of mercy is just, then we’re saying that one has a right to mercy, that it’s not a gift. That seems wrong too.)

(Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, 1988, via George W. Rainbolt, “Mercy: An Independent, Imperfect Virtue,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27:2 [April 1990], 169-173.)

| Society

Roommates

A conference is attended by 1,000 delegates from various countries. It’s known that any three delegates can speak together without help, though one of the three may have to serve as interpreter for the other two. Prove that all the attendees can be accommodated in double rooms so that the two occupants of each room can speak to each other.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

First Impressions

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bertrand_Russell_photo.jpg

The beginnings of Algebra I found far more difficult [than Euclid], perhaps as a result of bad teaching. I was made to learn by heart: ‘The square of the sum of two numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice their product.’ I had not the vaguest idea what this meant, and when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way.

— The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1967

| Society

“Unified Field Theory”

In the beginning there was Aristotle,
And objects at rest tended to remain at rest,
And objects in motion tended to come to rest,
And soon everything was at rest,
And God saw that it was boring.

Then God created Newton,
And objects at rest tended to remain at rest,
But objects in motion tended to remain in motion,
And energy was conserved and momentum was conserved and matter was conserved,
And God saw that it was conservative.

Then God created Einstein,
And everything was relative,
And fast things became short,
And straight things became curved,
And the universe was filled with inertial frames,
And God saw that it was relatively general, but some of it was especially relative.

Then God created Bohr,
And there was the principle,
And the principle was quantum,
And all things were quantified,
But some things were still relative,
And God saw that it was confusing.

Then God was going to create Furgeson,
And Furgeson would have unified,
And he would have fielded a theory,
And all would have been one,
But it was the seventh day,
And God rested,
And objects at rest tend to remain at rest.

— Tim Joseph

| Poems · Science & Math

Accord

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gauss_dichtefunktion.svg

“Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact.” — Gabriel Lippmann, in a letter to Henri Poincaré

(Thanks, Tom.)

| Science & Math